Buffalo Bill Meets Queen Vic
May 9: Buffalo Bill's Wild West show opened in London on this day in 1887. The show had been playing across the U.S. for several years, and the Ned Buntline dime novels about Bill Cody had been popular for several decades, but the London production mar...
The Definitive Flaubert
May 8: Gustave Flaubert died on this day in 1880. Although he enjoyed a small circle of friends -- George Sand, Zola, and Maupassant among them -- and Frederick Brown's recent biography Flaubert (2006) finds a convivial streak, most agree that ordinary...
Reymont’s Poland
May 7: Wladyslaw Reymont, one of Poland's most famous nineteenth-century novelists, was born on this day in 1867. Reymont's best novels have been compared to the work of Thomas Hardy and Emile Zola, and in 1924, the year of his death, Reymont won the N...
Napoleon’s Return
May 5: Napoleon Bonaparte died in exile on this day in 1821. His burial on St. Helena a few days later, the body encased in not one but four coffins, was meant to discourage the most hopeful Napoleonist or relic merchant; his reburial in Paris in 1840 ...
Huxley, Science & the Royal Society
May 4: T. H. Huxley was born on this day in 1825. "Darwin's Bulldog" was one of the Victorian era's preeminent men of science, a respected social commentator, and a shaping influence on the Royal Society of London. Seeing Further, a recent collection o...
Machiavelli in Florence
May 3: The Italian humanist Niccolò Machiavelli was born on this day in 1469. Machiavelli's reputation is now based on The Prince, regarded as poster copy for political calculation and cynicism; in his 2011 biography Machiavelli, Miles J. Unger ...
The Hoover File
May 2: J. Edgar Hoover died on this day in 1972. Forty years later, the books exploring Hoover's uncertain legacy continue to appear. Among the most recently published is Enemies: A History of the FBI, by Pulitzer and National Book Award winner Tim Wei...
May Day, May Day…
May 1: Historians cite the 1886 May Day parade in Chicago -- some 80,000 marching for an eight-hour workday, the Haymarket Square Massacre coming just days later -- as one of the pivotal moments in modern labor history. In her recent Nickel and Dimed, ...
Sorting Plain from Fancy
April 30: Annie Dillard was born on this day in 1945. Dillard has earned high praise as a prose stylist; among her books is Living by Fiction, a reader-friendly field guide in which she sorts contemporary modernist writers into those who like a "fancy"...
Pinter Party
April 28: Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party, his first full-length play, opened on this day in 1958 in Cambridge, England. In a 1988 interview, Pinter said that the play expressed one of his most important themes, and sounded his own character-note: "...
"So Why Kepler?"
April 27: The universe was created on this day in 4977 B.C., according to the German mathematician and astronomer-astrologer Johannes Kepler. The date is off by over 13 billion years, say today's Big Bang theorists -- billions more than that, say some ...
"Broke What Breaks"
April 26: Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn on this day in 1914. Malamud's father was an impoverished grocer, and Malamud grew up among hard-luck, shoulder-shrugging Jewish immigrants, a type that appears in some of his stories -- "Take Pity," for e...
